Robert Tanitch reviews The Rite of Spring and Common Ground[s] at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London.

Common Ground[s] is calm, dignified and slow. The Rite of Spring is wild, savage and fast. The double bill is a collaboration between Sadler’s Wells, Pina Bausch Foundation in Germany and École des Sables in Senegal.

COMMON GROUND{S}. Two elderly female choreographers and dancers, 80-year-old Germaine Acogny and 70-year-old Malou Airaudo, dressed in black gowns, perform their slow and stately solos. They come together in duets and find common ground and mutual respect as well as maternal love.

Movement is mainly expressed in arms and the use of a long rod. There are buckets to wash feet. It is like watching two ancient monoliths come to life. The timeless images are powerful. The music is by Fabrice Bouillon La Forest.

During the interval, 20 stagehands, in full view of the audience, cover the whole stage with brown earth and then rake it.

THE RITE OF SPRING. Since its riotous premiere in Paris in 1913, there have been well over a hundred different versions and the role of sacrificial victim has been danced by women and men.

Pina Bausch famously asked, “How would you dance if you knew you were going to die?” 34 African dancers specially recruited from 13 African countries find out.

Bausch’s version, created in 1975, is a battle of the sexes, raw and stark. There are two phalanxes: the women, fearsome and panic-stricken, wear translucent slips; the men, aggressive and lustful, are bare-chested and wear trousers.

Stravinsky’s barbaric pulsating rhythm has an unflagging and exhilarating ferocity, which leaves the audience, let alone the dancers, exhausted. The frenzied pagan rite requires exceptional stamina from the massed corps and soloist. The energy, the speed, the sheer brutal primal fury is amazing.

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